Ten Issues You’ll Have Running An International Business
Do you want to build an international empire?
Do you imagine yourself as a digital nomad hustler bouncing from one country to the next, living the beach-and-premium-alcohol lifestyle with not a care in the world? What about being the head of a massive multinational corporation with hives of low-cost, foreign workers building you products on the cheap which you sell at a premium in first world nations?
…Slow it down a second.
There are many benefits to working internationally and having a global business. But if you’re read the 4 hour work week and think you’re just going to get some cute Vietnamese girls to do your bidding for $50 a month and there are no negatives, then you’re kidding yourself.
This article will bring a dose of reality into your life.
I’ve hired multiple people and am sourcing products from abroad, and I’ve been hired by more people from all the inhabited continents. Here are some of the drawbacks with international business that you will come across.
“Everyone Speaks English”… But Not Your English
The guys selling you e-commerce courses all tell you, “There are no barriers to entry” and they’re lying. A big fib that they tell is the language issue.
“Chinese people speak great English!”
“You can hire a native English speaker from Asia and they’ll answer all your calls for $100 a month.”
“English is the world’s biggest language and pretty much everyone speaks it.”
These types of statements are false. Most people can’t speak English. Second language ability in English is massively overstated and every freelancer who is non-native will talk up abilities they don’t have because it makes them more money.
Even the ones that do don’t speak your English. Aside from the broken English contingent, there are also “native English speakers” that speak something so different from UK/US English that it’s very difficult to work with them efficiently.
I’ve had language problems with Americans in the past – what one term means in England is completely different in say, Texas. Now places like Hong Kong or India will have English as an official and native language in some parts, but if you work with people who are native to that area… expect language problems.
Time Zones Make Everything Difficult
You cannot underestimate how irritating it is to work with someone on the other side of the world. For instance, I have clients that work out of the digital nomad hubs in Hong Kong, Chiang Mai and the like.
I often have two choices: talk to these guys when I’m fresh first thing in the morning (and they are wrapping everything up for the day) or talk to them when I’m finishing for the day (and it’s first thing in the morning for them.)
Now guys and girls in their late teens or early twenties might read this and say, “That’s cool… I’m ok with staying up until 4am anyway.” Trust me, by the time you hit thirty, you won’t be.
Even before then, time zones are a pain. Sometimes people will say to me, “I’ll get this done and sent to you tomorrow.” I’ll be sat there waiting, not realising that tomorrow for them is not until the next day. (If they’re hours behind you.)
This is basically unavoidable and it makes everything take longer.
Quality Control… No Control, Varying Quality
My big problem with dropshipping as a business model is this: You have no control over the product or the process that goes into making that product.
Any business model that works on a global scale will have some of this inherent to it. Let’s say you hire freelancers from India. Unless you micromanage them to an unhelpful point, there’s the potential for you to spend weeks on a software project or website only for it not to work.
Or if you’re shipping in physical products… you either spend money on a QA tester who has been vetted by someone you trust of you risk your product exploding in some child’s face or whatever.
Business Practices Vary Massively Even In Best Case Scenarios
Most of the issues you’ll have with an international business are more subtle than the ones I’ve mentioned so far.
The fact is business practices vary massively across similar countries, let alone different ones. Here’s an example: In the USA, a company who pays you believes that they own your soul. Even when you’re a freelancer, once you’ve agreed to work with a company, they tend to assume that they can decide what you do, when you do it and generally have a line of contact with you at all times.
This is pretty alien to most of the world where answering your phone and working when you’re not paid to work is unheard of. It’s also exacerbated by the fact that many US companies don’t seem to understand the time zone thing from above; I’ve worked for numerous US clients and woken up to a barrage of angry emails asking me why I’m not responding.
Compare this with some other countries where if you verbally agree to work together, you could get the work done in two hours or two years… you can see how it gets complicated.
Some cultures view contracts as absolute and binding, other cultures think of them like a gentlemen’s handshake.
Intellectual Property Is Unenforceable
As an example of the above point; copyright law.
Now, in the West, we take for granted that if you have an idea, you somewhat own it and have the right to use it exclusively.
A lot of cultures don’t even have the idea of that. They can’t recognise it and if they see an idea, they figure there’s nothing wrong with copying it.
Other cultures understand the principle but don’t care.
Now, the point is that in a global landscape, you can’t enforce intellectual property laws. I’ve known people who started a kickstarter campaign for their new great invention and that product design has been copied, manufactured and put up for sale on Alibaba before the Kickstarter even finished.
You have to be vigilant when you’re working internationally. Here’s why:
Xenophobia Makes Complete Sense
I’m not going to justify or condemn xenophobia in anyway. Nor am I going to go on an evolutionary psychology rant fit only for the weird-right blogs run by strange looking fellows who should probably go outside more.
But let me put it this way.
If you roll up in a country and expect the fact that you’re throwing money in people’s faces to mean they’ll be loyal to you… you’re being incredibly naïve.
On a micro-scale, your workers are going to care more about their personal lives than they do about your business empire goals. They’re also going to take what they can from you and not worry too much about upsetting the apple cart: after all, there are no social consequences to upsetting some random guy half the world away.
On a macro-scale, I see tons of people getting upset on the internet because they’ve gone to SEA or Eastern Europe and expect everything to be the same as in their home country. Realistically, very few countries want foreigners to come and exploit them for obvious reasons. Therefore, you’re going to be locked out of things and you’re going to have to pay more for things because every country (with a few exceptions) would rather that they were making the money rather than random foreign business #29048.
Travelling Is A Massive Time And Money Sink
The dream is to see the world, have a home on every continent and do all this without expending much time and effort, right?
In reality, travelling is a pain in the arse if you do it for business. It takes hours – potentially days – out of your schedule and you have to make that up. If you’re flying to and fro to meet with suppliers or manage a team, this eats into your budget and your schedule and it’s a lot easier for travel plans to go wrong on a global scale than it is a local one.
When a main road near you is shut, then you’ll take a one-hour detour and go about your day. If British Airways have a computer malfunction, you can spend days in a foreign city burning through money with no idea when you’ll be able to get back on track.
Skype Is Not Your Friend
“But Jamie,” you say, “I don’t have to travel… I can just use the internet and Skype call people!”
Skype is also a pain. There are the time schedules not working, the business practices and all that we’ve mentioned.
But there are simple technical issues: Skype is mostly reliable, but sometimes you’ll get cut off. It’s the same with most of the tech that allows internet businesses to run; nowhere near as effective as face-to-face meetings at building rapport, getting work done or anything else.
It’s a helpful technology, don’t get me wrong, but people who think that tech is going to solve every problem with managing an international business are incredibly naïve.
Everything Is Less Effective
All of these things add up to the fact that a global empire is significantly more trouble to manage than a non-global one. I haven’t even touched on a lot of things: customer service, payment schedules, absconding freelancers etc. because they’re not universal.
Again, I’m not saying, “Don’t work with anyone outside your home town” but be aware of the frustrations you’ll get.
There’s also a final thing that adds to frustration:
It’s Lonely
The anti-social among you will have read that heading and think, “Cry me a river, wimp.”
But the truth of the matter is that when you have international contacts; be they business or friends, it can get quite annoying.
Say you’ve got a dropshipping business (hopefully you haven’t but whatever) and you import to the US from China while living in Spain. You can’t speak to your suppliers because they’re asleep when you’re working. Neither can you speak to your customers because again, they’re miles away. You have no contact with any stage of your business.
That’s very isolating when you compare it to working in your local pet store or whatever.
You can have hundreds of business contacts spread all around the globe and be more isolated than a local company that has five regular customers.
This is something to bear in mind.
Final Thoughts
Alright, final thoughts time.
I’m in no way suggesting that working globally is bad. In fact, it’s awesome. I do it and there are many positives.
But it’s not the magic experience that some gurus and motivational entrepreneur types paint it to be. There are real issues and you will have to overcome them. If you don’t, you’ll be out of business pretty quickly and some foreigners will probably extract as much of your bank balance before you are as they can.
As with all things, bear in mind the risks and look at things with a critical eye as opposed to a naïve one, and you’ll do better.